He is also one of the largest private landowners in the United States, and he claims to have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to buy about a million acres of land, equivalent to about 1,600 square miles. By comparison, Rhode Island has a land area of only 1,215 square miles. LandReport100, which tracks land ownership, shows that Kelly is the fourth-largest private landowner in the United States by acreage, behind John Malone, chairman of the media group, media magnate Ted Turner (and the Emerson family, led by timber tycoon Archie Aldis Emerson).

Kelly said it was not his goal to become one of the largest landowners in the United States. In an interview, he said, "I grew up on a farm, and that's the best explanation. The land is something I know, it's something that attracts me, it's part of my DNA. ”

In a turbulent period in the financial sector, land has become an increasingly sought-after investment. Some investors see land as a hedge against inflation, while low interest rates around the world make it cheaper to buy. Against the backdrop of rising global food prices and the expected recovery of the housing market, some bankers are touting land as one of the few areas where real returns can be made from assets whose potential value will continue to rise. "It's a non-destructible commodity, it's a nice area to put my money in, and it's better than derivatives." ”

Dennis Moon, head of Specialty Asset Management at U.S. Trust, a private wealth management arm owned by Bank of America, said land is an easy-to-understand investment. So attractive. Over the past year, Moon's clients have more than doubled their direct investment in irrigated arable land — land that produces crops such as corn, soybeans and wheat — to about $175 million. The net income for the year is about 4%. Other customers are more cautious, warning that high growth could mean a bubble in the market, with risks including fluctuations in the price of agricultural products, the value of farmland and the cost of agricultural production.

Kelly buys ranches exclusively, and the annual income they bring is not high. In fact, their value lies in the potential appreciation of the land. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the average value of farms in the U.S. is up 12 percent from five years ago, with Texas up 30 percent over five years. Investors sell the ranch to developers or sell it to the wealthy for a profit by using it as "conspicuous ranch" (pastures for fishing and hunting).

Brad Kelly's estate includes the Iron Mountain Ranch near Marathon in Western Texas. It covers an area of about 30,000 acres.

T. Boone Pickens, a Texas oil magnate, said of his strategy of investing in ranching, "It's simple. It is to change the use of land. Recently, he joined six other investors in a newly formed ranch fund called SportingRanchCapital. Jay Ellis, the fund's manager, said the plan is to buy 12 to 15 state-of-the-art ranches in Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Oregon and Idaho, renovate them and resell them as "conspicuous recreational ranches." The fund completed its first purchase in August for about $6 million in cash, a 760-acre ranch in Colorado with 2.6 miles of fishable streams and five lakes. The fund hopes to re-list it for more than $10 million in 2014.

Turner first ventured into buying ranches in 1987. It was about fly fishing and relieving stress. Turner wrote in an email. "I fell in love with the West, the open spaces, the wildlife and the beautiful scenery. I knew right away that I wanted more, much, much more land. But he's also trying to make the ranch's business, which is usually raising bison, profitable. "When we think about a property, we always look at the investment value in addition to its recreational and animal protection benefits," he said. ”

Kelly's ranch investment strategy is different. He often looks for cost-effective cattle farms in remote places where he thinks they are undervalued, buys them, and then holds them for the long term. He likes to buy plots of land that are adjacent to each other because it is more efficient to run a ranch on a large plot of land, and it is often easier to buy adjacent land because he already knows what he is buying and what kind of person the seller is. Furthermore. Nor will he develop the land he bought. "We're not going to impose our way of doing things on other people," he said. In this way, he combined several of his cattle breeding occasions in remote areas of Texas, Florida and New Mexico.

After buying the land. Kelly tends to practice what some ranchers call a "recuperation" strategy. He'll keep the cattle business running, basically releasing the land to the previous owners who already know how to run the existing business. Mr. Kelly said his ranch business was breaking even, and that the farm workers and herdsmen working on land owned by Mr. Kelly did not respond to reporters' requests for interviews.

The value of Kelly's land investment is difficult to calculate. Johnny Carpenter, a real estate agent in Alpine, Texas, said, "When he started buying farms here, we all thought he was crazy. In five years, Carpenter sold about six West Texas ranches to Kelly. Since then, Mr. Kelly has doubled the value of the land he bought in places with beautiful mountain views, he said. Chip Cole, a ranch broker in SanAngelo, Texas, who was involved in the sale of about 15 ranches that Mr. Kelly bought, said the price of those lots doubled in 2005 and 2006. By 2008, sales had begun to stagnate, making it more difficult to estimate current values, but Cole suspected that their prices had weakened.

Few things infuriate Kelly more than being called a land speculator. He argues that he has sold about 15 per cent of all the land he owns over the past 30 years, and that he has continued to buy land in the process, with less than half a percentage point of land sold in total, most of which are for management reasons. "We are very proud of the improvements we have made to our properties," he said. He also said he replaces and repairs dozens of miles of fences every year and keeps water supplies to water sources and wells.

People who worked for Kelly recalled that he would occasionally come to the ranch on weekends with a large group of friends and family to hunt or fish. In the evenings they play poker and drink bourbon.

Brad Kelly's Iron Mountain Ranch.

HomerMills began working for Kelly in West Texas in 1999, tending to more than a dozen ranches he purchased over the next five years. He described Kelly as "Mr. Good Kentucky." He recalls that Kelly would sometimes wear a kilt (Kelly said "they were very comfortable to wear" when asked about it), a hobby of cooking (Mills said he could make "very tasty cornbread"), and a fishing but not a hunting man. For a while, Kelly also grew a long red beard, earning him the nickname "ZZTop".

Aside from all these quirks, Kelly is a shrewd businessman who stays out of the spotlight. Most of his properties are listed on companies such as SpanishTrailLand & CattleCo. and Texas Mountain CattleCo. Realtors say they often deal with his business manager, Greg Betterton, a lawyer based in Venice, Fla. Joe Taggart, managing director of LandVest, a Boston-based real estate and timberland consultancy, said, "We don't have to call Brad Kelly, he'll call you." The whole South wanted to show him the land, and he had always been the most efficient man in the field who kept a low profile. ”

In 1997, Kelly began investing in real estate outside of Kentucky. He was drawn to West Texas, where he says he now owns about 850,000 acres because of the good prices and the fact that he finds the scenery and the location secluded. After he bought some land, real estate agents started contacting him to get him to buy more land.

Kelly bought a house in Boca Grande in 1997 for about $1 million, and he went on a land spree in Florida. He later sold the house and bought a 5,923-square-foot (550-square-meter) three-bedroom home in Boca Grande for $5.5 million in 2000. He had been looking for land with the intention of opening a place to raise animals, a hobby that began with raising cattle of rare breeds, according to him. So in 2004 and 2005, he bought about 40,000 acres in DeSoto County, located in western Florida, for a rumored $50 million.

Cows, hippos, rhinos, African oryx, bison and other endangered animals. He also works with zoos and animal protection organizations with the ultimate goal of releasing the animals back into their native habitats. (To be continued.) )